After a rather long period of discernment over the appropriateness and timing of the visit, Pope Benedict XVI is finally travelling the ancient way of pilgrims to the Holy Land. However, despite the Pope's intention to behave like an ordinary and humble pilgrim, everybody knows he is no ordinary pilgrim. The political implications of his pilgrimage are all too obvious.

It is precisely the pilgrimage's combination of spiritual and political elements that will help the Pope achieve the goal of this controversial pilgrimage.

For, if the Pope intends to help bring peace to the region, it is hard to imagine that a purely political gesture on his part would help, given the sparks of controversy he has provoked in the past among Muslims and Jews.

Furthermore, politics is just one dimension of papal office. The other one, arguably more important, is spiritual. That is why the Pope can rightly understand himself as a humble pilgrim.

His display of humility should particularly help his cause, given the opposition and demand from some groups. It has still to be seen how he will express his humility during his visits and talks, especially to Muslim and Jewish sites and figures.

By deciding to come at this troubled time, the Pope exposes himself to many difficult and challenging demands in the complexity of the peace process in the region. It is challenging to strike a delicate balance amid different pleas and demands in the region. Arab Christians in Gaza demands the focus of the pontiff's prime attention, due to their suffering during the war.

Some Muslim factions challenge the Pope to apologize for his Regensburg talk where he made controversial remarks on Islam, while Jewish groups demand that he rectify the mishaps surrounding his most recent move of rehabilitating Richard Williamson, a British-born bishop, known to be a Holocaust denier.

Thus by performing the pilgrimage now, the Pope makes himself vulnerable to critics, despite his future actions and accomplishment. However, controversies aside, this Pope has also proved himself capable of facilitating reconciliation and healing as shown during his meeting with the representatives of the clergy sexual abuse scandal in New York last year. To expose oneself to such a challenge is indeed a sign of humility and magnanimity.

The case of Middle East has shown that promoting peace, especially in times of great turmoil and conflict, needs more than well-calculated political strategies. In this context, pilgrimage, understood as a deeply spiritual endeavor, seems to be a proper means to adopt. For, in the tradition of the Church, pilgrimage has been honored as a special moment where pilgrims are searching to understand self, other, and God. It is a moment of self-reflection and self-searching accompanied by ascetic and spiritual practices such as fasting.

In the experiences of countless pilgrims, pilgrimage is rather intimately connected to life's crises. During that moment, pilgrims are encouraged to reflect on what has gone amiss in their lives. Combined with penitential and ascetic practices, this process of self-reflection is believed to bear fruits.

Thus, pilgrimage is a gesture of devotion driven by an overwhelming sense of one's dependence to God, the Hospitable Other. At times of crises, this dependence is felt most acutely.

At this moment, humility that comes from a realization of one's own helplessness before the magnitude of the crises as well as a realization of one's fundamental connectedness to God, the ultimate source of life, is a virtue that becomes a conditio sine qua non for a true pilgrimage.

Thus, pilgrimage appears to be a proper means to help heal the wounds left by the seemingly perennial political conflicts in the region. More than any other major pilgrimages, pilgrimage to the Holy Land is unique due to the presence of the religious other. For Christian pilgrims, this otherness is encountered in the presence of the Jews and Muslims. But the challenge here is to also understand this otherness as part of one's identity.

For isn't it true that all these three faiths stem from one Abrahamic root? Isn't it true that these three communities have been sharing the same space for many centuries?

It is very fortunate that the Pope is scheduled to visit Jewish and Muslim sites. In Arabic, a visitation is called ziyara, the same name used to designate a Muslim pilgrimage to shrines and tombs of the saints. Every visit or ziyara always involves an exchange and display of mutual respect, generosity and hospitality. It is insightful to see that the Latin word hospes denotes both host and guest.

Thus, hospitality (derived from the same word) is by definition mutual. The guest expresses his hospitality to the host by paying him a visit; the host by hosting the guest. In many practices of pilgrimage, especially in the past, strangers become friends due to this display of hospitality.

So, if a pope pays a visit to the holy places of other religious traditions, the significance of the exchange of hospitality is enormous. What will hopefully result from such an exchange is friendship, forgiveness and eventually, peace, however delicate and complex they might be in the Middle Eastern context.

The writer is a Ph.D. candidate in comparative theology at Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, US. Currently he is doing research on the practice of pilgrimage among Muslims and Christians.

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